Grief in Two Parts
by SadieGrace
Summary: "Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life." (Anne Roiphe) A slightly different take on Tobias in the end of Allegiant. Just something that grew in my head as I tried to sleep while reading Allegiant.


_Allegiant Spoilers Below._

_AN: I've never posted anything but NCIS: LA fanfic here before, but I finished the Divergent Trilogy a few days ago and those characters have been hanging on to all my inspiration. I had the ending of Allegiant spoiled for me before I finished it, so I knew Tris died before I actually got there. I forced myself to be responsible and go to bed before I actually finished Allegiant since I had to work in the morning, but I might as well have just stayed up and read it, since I was awake half the night with this writing itself in my head, anyway._

_When I did finish it, I actually loved the way Roth dealt with it, and was amused that it matched up with this, which I had already written, in several points. But, this has still hung onto me, and I still felt like Tobias' reaction had the potential to be a little more virulent, and I needed to get this out of my head, so I'm posting it anyway. It picks up as Tobias and Christina are returning to the Compound, before they find out what has happened.  
_

* * *

**Tobias**

I enter the room with a spring in my step. We were successful. We were more successful than I had ever dared hope we would be, and all around me are signs that Tris and the others here had been successful, too. For the first time in a long time, I feel hope. I feel like it might be possible to repair the damage that has been done to our lives and move on. To create a new life with Tris that is far removed from the deception and violence that have characterized this last year. I feel old, and yet I feel young again. I am ready to begin again.

Something lurches in me when I enter, before I can even register why. It feels wrong. Something is not right. Despite all the signs that their mission was accomplished, the air feels heavy with something.

Matthew turns to face me, and he looks pinched and... sorry? Why is Matthew looking at me like he's sorry?

And then I see Caleb turn toward me, alive, his face pale and drawn, and I _know _exactly what happened.

In that moment, I need no other reason to hate him.

"Tris." The sound rasps from my throat, torn out of me.

Caleb flinches at the sound of her name and Cara's eyes cloud over with tears.

"TRIS!" Her name comes out halfway between a scream and roar, all anguish and anger, and I lurch forward as if running for her, wherever she is, but Cara and Matthew catch me on either side and I stumble to a stop, wrenching out of their grip.

No matter how rough things have been between us at times, it's as if her soul has been inexplicably tied to mine from that first moment I pulled her from the net in Dauntless headquarters. No one has to say the words to tell me that she's gone, when they look at me I can feel it in the far reaches of who I am, the part of me that is her tearing away.

I've been freed from part of the prison of my past, only to be hurled into a new prison of grief and despair. I am almost ashamed that I would gladly trade it all back, give up my mother again, give up this tentative peace, take away all their memories, to get to keep Tris, to make a life with her.

Suddenly, all that we've been doing to save the world we know seems pointless. What possible reason could there be to save the world now, when my world has just ended?

* * *

They've cleaned and decontaminated her body and it's lying on a stark white bed in the hospital sector, pale and small as always, but quiet and calm in death as she never was in life.

The energy and fire that had defined her, that had drawn me inexorably to her with its magnetism is gone. I had thought that I would not believe it until I felt her pulse for myself, but as soon as I see her, I know.

My knees give out and I sink into a crouch, wanting to touch her but not wanting to feel the coldness of her skin.

My hands tremble violently and I drag them roughly down my face, not feeling the pain of the bruises and cuts, not feeling anything.

Then, the emotions come and I wish they had stayed away.

A wordless, shapeless sound of grief tears roughly from my throat and roars around the room, shaking trays and windows with its strength. I grasp for anything within my reach, and my hands land on a tray with assorted medical supplied on it. Blinded, I pick it up and hurl it across the room; it cracks against the wall and clatters to the floor. I let me fist follow the movement through, slamming my knuckles into the hard white tile of the wall, splitting them open and pouring blood down my arm and down the wall. I welcome the pain as a momentary distraction from the feeling of my heart being shredded by this truth.

It Christina who comes to me. She, who has been angry with me for so long, whose own grief is as fresh as mine, is soft and forgiving in the light of my loss. She places a gentle hand on my arm and I shrink away from it, as if anyone else's touch will erase the places where Tris last touched me.

It's not really her I'm angry at, not her I want to punish, but it comes out as low and menacing growl anyway.

"Don't touch me."

* * *

I barricade myself in the room where I held Tris just last night, collapsing in on myself on the couch that still smells like her. I know they will get through eventually, but I am relieved that they respect my privacy and my grief enough to leave me alone for a while. I know there is still much to be done in the aftermath of this night, but I can't bring myself to care. I can't, actually, bring myself to do anything. It's as if grief has weighted my mind and my muscles and they are sluggish and unable to carry my weight or the weight of coherent thought.

I thought I knew grief and guilt. I have lost enough friends in this war already; I have grieved for Uriah and Tori these last weeks already, for so many other losses. But that grief is not the same as what I feel now. This grief is a dark pit, pressing in on me from all sides, smaller than the wooden box of my fear landscape and without the relief of Tris' body pressed to mine. It is all my fears combined and come to life and all my hopes dead and buried in an ever-shrinking box.

I sit on the couch that still smells of her as the light fades and then grows again and then repeats the cycle. I curl into myself, clench myself together as if making myself as small as possible will make it harder for the pain to find me. As if holding onto myself will hold the pieces of me together that are trying to fly apart.

Eventually, Christina brings me a plate of food and a couple of bottles of water. I see her studying my face in silent compassion and I avert my eyes to keep from meeting hers. I guzzle the water as soon as it touches my lips, but I only get a bite or two of food down before it chokes me. Christina watches me, not saying anything. All her anger is gone, replaced by a need to care for me on behalf of her friend. She loved Tris, too. She knew her just as long as I did. She has lost much, too, but it doesn't give her a door into my grief.

I register the light coming and going around me, but not enough to count its passings. I fluctuate between a state of brief trembling awareness and long periods of blessed numbness.

* * *

I know only that it must be days before I venture out of the room one afternoon when the hallway is silent; the whole compound looks almost unfamiliar to my eyes. My object is the flask of Uriah's that I hid in one of the dormitory beds, and I find the dormitory blessedly empty as I search for it. I remember mentally reprimanding him for dealing with his grief so inappropriately, and now I only find myself thankful that I know where to find it.

I have felt guilty over Uriah for weeks, but now I think what I feel is envy. Had he felt like this? Had his soul been as deeply laced with Marlene's as mine with Tris'? It seems impossible, but I can see the echo of his grief in mine, and I envy his new oblivion.

My eyes catch on Tris' bed as I search, on the pillow and blankets still rumpled from her last night in them. In Abnegation, her bed would have been neatly made, but she doesn't fit neatly into those boxes anymore, and the messy bed is a Dauntless habit that she had picked up easily.

I let my fingertips run over her pillowcase, staring down at them almost unseeing.

Suddenly awakening, I snatch the pillow and the bedding from her bed and take it with me. It still smells of her, the soft musky smell that I recognize as her skin in the morning. I take a shower, if only because I have a rare flash of mental clarity and know that the stronger the smell of me is, the faster the smell of her will fade from the sheets. I carry them back to the couch with me cocooning myself in them, in the smell of her.

Cara would say that it is not healthy, but there is no part of me that cares what is healthy right now.

* * *

Cara is the one that brings me food and water next, and I am aware enough of the way she watches me, carefully, analytically, to know that she has probably slipped something into it. Sleeping serum, probably. I can see her eying the bruises under my eyes and the wounds that my exhausted body is slow to heal. I avoid anything that seems most likely to have been laced and, for a couple of days, it works.

Then she gets clever somehow, or I get careless, because I feel my eyelids drooping and my brain growing drowsy. She must have slipped it into the water instead of the food, because I touch so little of the food that it can't be enough to touch me. I have not consumed enough to put me all the way to sleep, but it is enough to pull me to the brink and my exhausted body does the rest.

That first time, I dream of her, smiling as she hovers over me and presses into me on the very couch where I sleep. Laughing and kissing me, telling me that she loves me and that I am worth loving, that I am not broken, that I am hers. Melting into me.

When I wake, I reach for her and she is not there, and it's as if the grief is brand new again, ripping into me for the first time and stealing my breath and my strength.

After that, I switch tactics; I reach for sleep and for the dreams every waking moment. It doesn't come on its own, my overwhelmed brain cannot rest enough to let go even though it cannot wake enough to really see anything but my grief. Instead of avoiding them, I start seeking out the things I think Cara and Matthew have most likely slipped the serum into.

The problem is, that is not the only dream that comes. Sometimes, I find myself back in my fear landscape, the last one, where I cannot save her. Sometimes, I dream of the death serum in clouds around her, slowly pulling her life away. I dream that I become my father and find her whimpering, flinching away from my grasp. The serum makes it impossible to wake myself from the nightmares and waking from the good dreams is gut-wrenching every time, but, still, a part of me drives me to seek it—probably the same masochistic part of me that took me back to my fear landscape over and over again back in Dauntless.

There's always a chance that this time it will be the girl reaching for my hand, kissing me in the chasm, forgiving me and choosing me and loving me. Alive.

I wonder how much it would take, if I could horde enough and take it together and... let go.

They must notice the pattern in what I eat and what I leave on the plate, because the food stops making me sleepy and so I stop forcing it down.

* * *

Caleb tries to come in once, but I snarl at him the moment I see him.

"Get out. Get. Out."

I wonder, briefly, what it feels like to know that someone's greatest wish is that you were dead.

* * *

Matthew comes and sits by me once or twice, silently sharing my grief in the way that maybe only he can. No words pass between us, but it is perhaps the most peace I have felt outside of my dreams in weeks.

When he finally stands to go, I speak, my voice rusty from lack of use and from the screams I know come in my sleep.

"Is there any more?" If he knows what I mean, he pretends he doesn't.

"The serum. The memory serum. Is there any more?"

I told Peter that it was the coward's way out, but I don't think I care anymore. It is one thing to be brave in the face of war and danger, it is another thing entirely to be brave in the face of the vast internal emptiness that I feel, in the face of the years ahead of me that I can see no reprieve in. Maybe it is cowardice, but maybe in this situation I am a coward.

"You don't want to forget, Tobias," is all he tells me as he turns to go.

He is wrong. I do want to forget. But I know he is right. Forgetting would be easy. Erasing the last weeks from my mind would heal the erosion in my mind and my soul, but it would leave me weak. It's the memories that make us stronger. _I think you're still the only person sharp enough to sharpen someone like me _she had said to me, and it's true both ways. She made me sharper, stronger than I was on my own. Without her memory I would be less. But, without _her_ I am already less, and I wonder which one is really better.

* * *

Zeke comes to my room one afternoon and drags me from it.

"Come on, Four, it's your birthday. Come out and spend it with us."

It's pointless, I think, to come out and celebrate the start of another year that I don't want to live in. I'm nineteen today, but I feel ninety-one. My sorrow and my experiences have made me ancient before my time.

I wonder idly if she ever celebrated a birthday. Birthdays were not celebrated in Abnegation, that much focus on oneself was selfish. The Dauntless are the opposite; they take any excuse for celebration and turn it into a wildly joyous affair. We never even had the chance to talk about those kind of things, never lived life together in anything that could be called _normal_ times, but I ache with all the missed opportunities to celebrate her birth.

It strikes me then that she never even _had _a birthday in the time that I knew her. It had been so short. It's been less than a year since I first met Tris, but I lived a lifetime in that year; I loved a lifetime's worth of love. Now, it feels like there is nothing left for the years that loom ahead.

* * *

My mother comes only occasionally after her arrival, as if she knows that she has not yet earned the right to share in my sorrow.

Most of the time, she only sits silently or speaks of the goings on in the compound and news from the City and allows me to be silent.

Then, one day she puts her hands on my shoulders and steers me outside and stands me facing the City, Chicago, where I can see the spires of the Hancock tower in the distance.

"I told her once," she murmurs as she looks off into the distance that my eyes fail to focus on, "that she was temporary. That my place in your life was permanent because I am your family, but that hers was just passing."

I tense in anger, one of the few emotions that I ever feel lately. She keeps speaking gently.

"I was wrong, wasn't I?"

She knows my answer and I do not speak it, unwilling and unable to around the fury surging in my veins.

Her next words soften me again.

"I would trade places if I could, Tobias, if I could make her live again for you.

"You want her to live, Tobias, and I cannot make her live again, but you can. She lives in you, in what she made you and how you will remember her, in what you will do because of her. She is permanent. As long as you live, as long as you_ fight_, as long as you refuse to give up, she will live in you." Her voice is fierce, powerful. "The only way you let her die, Tobias, is if you give up. So let. her. live. in. you, Tobias. Don't give up."

She says my name over and over, as if trying to reach that part of me that is Tobias and not Four, the way Tris had when I was under the simulation.

The tears come then, and I don't fight them off. Evelyn's arms come around me, and I allow another person's touch for the first time. I am a little boy again, sobbing in his mother's arms, but I am also a man with a wound that she cannot heal this time. But, maybe, she can still be a part of the healing.

I have loved. I have loved wildly and without reserve, and a part of the blood that flows in my veins will always belong to her. It will always be hers because I chose her. I chose her and she chose me.

And now, I wake every day and I choose her again. I choose what she would have wanted for me instead of what I feel like I want for myself. I grit my teeth and walk through the pain, and I make the world better for both of us. She was brave. She was Dauntless. Though the factions are gone now, their values still live in me. For me, now, every day is a Choosing Day, and like that day when I was sixteen, and like the day when she was sixteen, every day I choose to be brave on her behalf.

I choose to be Dauntless.

* * *

_AN: This is my first non-NCIS:LA fanfic, and I think it's my first first-person POV, so I'd love it if you'd leave a review and let me know what you think. _


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